


a sky full of lights, and none of them stars

by haloud



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, M/M, Pining, post-episode 1x10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 14:07:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18367553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: It’s nighttime in some unnamed patch of the desert, and Alex is alone. It’s just him, and he’s not drinking, and he’s got a lie waiting to happen to keep him company.





	a sky full of lights, and none of them stars

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the deepest of sighs, the frankest of shadows by gang of youths, and it's mandatory listening for this fic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9URhKk22xbM
> 
> this fic is not for redistribution without express permission.

It’s nighttime in some unnamed patch of the desert, and Alex is alone. It’s just him, and he’s not drinking, and he’s got a lie waiting to happen to keep him company. There’s a piece of an alien spaceship in a backpack he tossed on the passenger seat.

In life, there are forgotten things, hidden things, and things people pretend not to see.

Tucked away in a filing cabinet in Jesse Manes’s closet, there are four drawers labelled with the names of his sons in his wife’s neat, careful hand. They haven’t been touched in almost two decades—out of negligence, out of denial, out of some sad vestige of sentimentality—and each drawer contains childhood mementos and memories: A+ papers; Field Day ribbons; report cards. Four crayon drawings of a smiling man in fatigues, surrounded by his family. Written in blocky, childish hand four times over: MY HERO; MY HERO; MY HERO; MY HERO.

Even in the absolute doldrums of teenage rebellion, Alex was never much of a fire-starter. He favored more passive resistance, like listening to Simple Plan, doing his own piercings, and existing. Arson might have looked more appealing if he’d known that filing cabinet existed.

Jesse Manes may hold on fiercely to the glorious past, but Alex knows there are a lot of things that don’t last. Like playing happy families; like the hatred of a high school bully. Like safety in a kiss. The world changes in seconds, in fractions of seconds, in swings of a hammer, in atoms of blood and muscle, cartilage and bone. All anyone can hope to do is hold on and walk away on their own two feet.

Alex managed to leave Roswell, once, then it pulled him back, until he clawed and scraped his way back out again. It’s pushed and pulled for his whole adult life, like the movement of an ocean he never saw until he went flying off to get blown up in someone else’s desert. It’s not like his bank account isn’t full enough these days; no airman’s ever going to get rich off Uncle Sam, but he could have afforded any apartment in any city that’s never heard the name Jesse Manes. There are plenty of physical therapists on the east coast. Plenty of VA centers in Ohio or Austin or Cali. He could have gone somewhere, anywhere else.

It’s just that his buddies used to play these old, bad country songs, and Alex knows a boy with a pickup truck.

Roswell fits Michael Guerin like a broken thing, and maybe that’s why Alex can’t put it in the rearview. Like horses, like a reliable pair of boots, there’s a part of Alex that’ll never fit anything else no matter how far he runs or how hard he tries. Every dusty street corner is the slope of his shoulder; every penny in the till is sunlight off his eyes. The ripple of heat off the blacktops and cars makes Alex blush because he knows weak-kneed and giggling just how it feels to be liquid like that. The desert is beautiful. Roswell is all desert. Roswell is the closest thing there is to home. And everything in Roswell is Michael Guerin, piece by piece. It’s the simplest thing in the world to believe that he lay sleeping for fifty years, that he was safe and hidden and breathing and waiting all along until it was time for them to meet.

Unchecked, Alex has the kind of thoughts retained by a romantic mind, and it’s a constant battle to keep his own gray matter in firm hand. Then he loses the war every time, and all it takes is the pouting line of Guerin’s mouth and Alex’s pathological need to possess it with his own.

Sitting behind the wheel of his parked car, Alex fingers the healed hollow of his earlobe. He’s never been able to keep up in the lab with Liz or Kyle, but he tries to take an analytical approach even when he’s fighting for his life. One wrong step, after all, is the difference between a pas de deux and a hospital bed. So he white-knuckled his way through high school, through basic training, through losing his leg. He kept it together, sharpened to a brittle point, through three tours, through his own parade, through Jim Valenti’s funeral.

Now, there’s a stiffness to his fingers when he tries to uncurl his fist. It turns out the same is true of the heart when it’s learning to beat again. Of course he knows that it hurts Michael every time he walks away. He knows it logically, clinically, like how he knows that gravity pulls on birds. To Alex it feels like the stabbing buzz of a sleeping limb. In Michael’s eyes it looks like something sharper, something bloodier, something less benign. But really, who’s to say? They’ve never talked about it, because it’s easier to lose themselves in the slide of skin on skin, in the soothing of an ache that otherwise never goes away.

No matter how it feels when he’s trapped in the headlights of Michael’s new-penny gaze, they’re not children any more. Michael’s not that wannabe desperado; his eyes rolled back off the horizon and up to somewhere Alex can’t follow, not on crutches or in a bird or tangled together in the sheets. Alex has come a long fucking way from practicing his waltz one-sided in the back room of the museum.

Maybe this is what Alex deserves, this whole-body numbness, this ringing in his ears. He thinks that’s probably true, that he’s probably brought this on himself. Procedure for stab wounds is to leave the implement in, because if it’s removed it just does more damage and increases the risk the victim will bleed out. But Alex pulled and pulled, and now he’s damned them both.

So this is what he deserves.

It’s nighttime in the desert, and Alex is alone. He once said that the world ends with a whimper, and when he said it he was trying to be cruel. But now it’s him wishing for a fight worth picking, looking for a hurt spot on something made of stone. He turns the alien panel over in his hands, and it ripples under his fingertips. When Michael leaves, what happens to Roswell, where the only air to breathe is breaths he’s taken? It’s time to stop running, so Alex can’t, _can’t_ just leave this thing in a hole in the ground and never look back. What he wouldn’t give for it to slip out of his hands and disappear.

But this thing, this marvel, this impossible piece of an impossible puzzle, is the only thing heavy enough to balance a scale Alex has been weighting since he was seventeen and his life was a house on fire. He kicked out the door and survived; it’s just that he never felt safe again except when held underwater, even though drowning was the slower death. The night wind tickles the back of Alex’s neck, and he bows his head, defeated. The distant town makes the horizon hazy, and Alex can make believe it’s light pollution instead of desperate, choking grief blurring his view of the stars. It’s too quiet out here, but Alex deserves that too.

Michael deserves to know, just like Alex deserves the smoke and water filling him up in equal measure.

But _God_ , how is Alex going to tell him?

**Author's Note:**

> malex is neat because i get to take my abandonment issues and my avoidant personality disorder and make them kiss  
> not that any kissing happens in this fic, but still
> 
> mostly I wrote this fic because while I do relate to alex, I kind of felt the need to write to understand what's going on in that hard head of his. boy i am begging you to use your words.
> 
> im also haloud on tumblr and haloudd on twitter, but i very recently started a rnm sideblog @ cosmicsolipsism.tumblr.com so fans of this fic will want to follow me there :)
> 
> seriously go listen to the title song DO IT


End file.
